SocMetrics is a platform built to discover, create, and monitor topical influencers -- that is people who contribute and initiate conversations around specific subject matters.
During our conversation and tool demonstration, I learned a bit more about the features I included in the deck I used for the conversation about influence at Mesh. SocMetrics work is primarily with agencies on behalf of brands.
The top questions they help address are:
- How can we leverage social media to get the client’s Brand messages across in an authentic way?
- How can we help them engage in the conversation with the right influencers to drive desired brand outcomes?
- How can we prove the value of our social media work to clients?
The business needs this platform addresses cut across marketing and sales, customer service, and product development. For example, marketing use cases may be identifying key topical influencers for product launches, then looking at the analytics of that program that can inform a better outreach to brand advocates.
From identifying influential customers to performing competitive analysis, the tool pulls from 100 topics it is currently listening for in social networks -- bit.ly, LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook, etc.
Say you want to measure the effectiveness of a program, you have the ability to isolate time periods and look at activity.
They determine topical influence through a combination of:
- peer validation - who is following you?
- topicality - I like also to think about keyword density
- ability to drive action - e.g., do the links these people post get shared?
While the documented topics so far are 100, the team continues to add those that become relevant to agencies and their clients. As well, each topic has multiple influencers assigned to it.
Platform pros
No doubt due to the background from MIT Labs of Rebecca Xiong, VP of product development, and Jason Troy, founder of RubyNow, the product was conceived with user experience at its core from the get go.
- you can monitor and follow topics in real time
- it's easy to use - you can filter people while browsing
- you can track things at a very deep level per influencer
Another good feature is the ability to track across online networks, and the peer validation across offline activities -- events, comments made by others, etc.
Teams can collaborate on lists and insert notes on each record for future reference. It can be helpful in the event of a crisis as well, because of its real time search results. In fact, I'm liking it as a listening tool.
What would be interesting to see
During out review, I was thinking about a specific application that would be useful -- to identify topical influencers among a company's customer base. I've long said that customers and people in general are way ahead of organizations when it comes to the use of social tools to express themselves.
And in thinking about expressing, how about giving users feedback and stats on what they like, share, and retweet and further actions in their social graph? This is a platform created for third parties, I realize. Agencies and brands taking a peek at what people do.
I cannot help but think that feedback loops around "how am I doing?" for the people being tracked might lead to surprising results.
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It's amazing how far we've come in being able to quantify the results of social media. Careful though, there is much art to creating great social media campaigns, and often we're tempted to conform our strategies to the measuring instrument so that results can be observed precisely. But this can compromise the art and you're left with boring campaigns. Sometimes you have to be willing to let go of the measuring and just do great work.
Posted by: Al Pittampalli | June 15, 2011 at 08:35 AM
Well said, Al. As I see it, time and resources spent on identifying influencers is time not spent on making the product/service being communicated better.
The pursuit of influence is the pursuit of WOM. Provide a genuinely better product that truly improves the lives of people viewed as equals (not customers) and the brand becomes influential.
We should always be listening, but we should be willing - and able - to step up our game and make a difference.
Posted by: Brian Driggs | June 15, 2011 at 12:41 PM